Nightstalkers (13 page)

“But how did this start?” Kirk asked.

“When the first Rift was opened,” Doc said.

“Who did that?” Kirk asked.

“A German scientist here at Area 51,” Doc said. “Near the end and after World War II we brought a bunch of their scientists over here to work on—”

“Fucking Nazis,” Mac said.

“—various projects under the auspices of Operation Paperclip. We fought the Russians for the brain trust left from the Third Reich. It made Guantanamo look like a joke. Most people know about the ones we used in the space program, but we took whoever
we could grab, and there were several theoretical physicists who had really produced nothing of practical use for the Germans, but were let loose in the labs in Area 51 to experiment—”

“Fuck around,” Mac said.

“—and one of them developed a way to open a Rift in 1948,” Doc said. “You can read about it in the binders that Nada gave you. It turned out to be a mess, since no one had encountered the Fireflies before and it took them a while—”

“And a lot of good men,” Mac interjected.

“—before they were able to figure it out, shut the Rift, and destroy the Fireflies. The first version of the Nightstalkers was formed under the supervision of a committee called Majestic 12 and originally headquartered at Area 51. Their primary mission was to find and destroy Fireflies and close the Rift they came out of. Since 1948 there have been twenty-seven recorded openings of Rifts.”

“All in the US?” Kirk asked.

“Most,” Doc said. “The theory behind them is the key, and ever since 1948, it’s been like the Holy Grail of physicists to create a controlled Rift and figure out what’s on the other side. No one has even been able to control one and no one has ever figured out what’s on the other side.”

“They’ve all dropped the Grail,” Eagle said. “They can open them and Doc here can shut them, but they can’t be controlled. Pretty much everyone who has opened one gets sucked through. To where, we have no idea, but such is the price of stupidity.”

“What about Rifts outside the US?” Kirk asked.

“The Russians have a team like us,” Doc said, “and between us we cover the world. We’ve done five missions overseas.”

“Not fun,” Roland noted.

“The problem,” Doc said, “is that science has the potential—”

“To screw things up,” Moms said from the door of the CP. Kirk reacted without thinking, hopping to his feet and popping to attention like he was back in the Ranger Bat.

Moms smiled. “I like this. It’s like the real army.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Nada said from behind her.

“Chill, dude,” Mac said.

Kirk sheepishly sat back down, the habits of the Rangers hard to let go of.

“In my opinion, the real birth of the Nightstalkers,” Moms said, “was not 1948, but on the sixteenth of June, 1945, not too far from here in the desert outside Alamogordo Air Force Base.”

“A Rift?” Kirk asked.

“No. Worse.” Moms came over to the team table and took a seat. Nada also grabbed a chair. “On that day, at five thirty in the morning, the first atomic weapon was detonated. You have to understand the context. They were trying something unknown. There were no computer projections. Those guys were using slide rulers. Some of the smartest people out there in that desert, people who had helped build the bomb, were convinced they were going to start an atomic chain reaction that would consume the entire world. And they detonated it anyway.

“Oppenheimer looked at the mushroom cloud and thought of a Hindu saying:
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds
. At that point, man crossed a line that few have really focused on. We became capable of destroying ourselves.”

“And we haven’t stopped since,” Nada said. “Not long ago, at the supercollider near Geneva, they discovered the—what is it, Doc?”

Doc had a defeated look on his face, having been through this discussion before. “The Higgs boson particle.”

“Often called the God particle,” Eagle threw in.

Nada picked back up. “But when they first turned that thing on, there were some scientists who speculated they might actually cause a black hole and consume the planet,” Nada said. “But they turned it on anyway.”

“That held an incredibly small possibility,” Doc argued.

“But a possibility nonetheless,” Nada said.

“The pursuit of knowledge—” Doc began, but Nada cut him off again.

“Us and the Russians, both our teams, we were over there, waiting that day.” Nada shrugged. “We weren’t sure what we could do, but we were ready to try if anything went wonky. And they actually did—nine days after that thing was turned on it broke.”

“Magnet quench,” Doc said, as if anyone had an idea what that meant.

“Right. Clusterfuck,” Nada clarified. “We’d redeployed back to the States and had to fly back over there. They lost five tons of super-heated helium. Took forever to cool it down. Faulty electrical connection, they said. Took the thing off-line for over a year. And that still didn’t stop them. They fired it up again. And again and again. Until now they found one of the things they were looking for. But what if they find something they weren’t looking for?”

“Would you have us move back into caves?” Doc asked.

“I’d prefer if we didn’t blast ourselves back into caves,” Nada argued.

“The Higgs boson could hold the key to figuring out the Rifts and the Fireflies,” Doc shot back. “It might make that part of our job unnecessary if we really can control the Rifts.”

“I don’t want to control the damn things,” Nada said, “I want to stop them. Forever. I’ve lost friends to the Fireflies.”

“All right, gentlemen,” Moms said, cutting off the growing argument. “Speaking of caves, Doc, show our newest member the Can. The rest of you, grab some sleep.”

Doc made a face indicating it was not a task he relished, but he got to his feet. “Come with me, Kirk.”

Doc hated this part of his job, but it was necessary. Every member of the team had to understand the process. The elevator inside Groom Mountain had been descending fast for over ten minutes and suddenly came to a jarring halt next to massive air ducts that poured cold air into the cavern.

“Don’t like being underground?” Kirk said as the whine of the elevator wound down.

“Not particularly,” Doc said. He didn’t want to get into how his mind was calculating how much rock and dirt was above them, automatically figuring out the weight, and what kind of pressure that would exert if it suddenly collapsed. He knew the odds were unlikely, but that knowledge was scant comfort.

They were over two miles below Area 51. This facility, having taken over three years to build and costing over fourteen billion dollars, served one purpose: to detect Rifts as they developed and then locate them.

Doc shoved aside the metal gate to the high-speed elevator and they walked down a corridor carved out of solid rock, over ten feet wide and ten high.

“Ahead is a natural cavern, a void that was discovered early in Area 51’s history. No one thought much of it, until it was decided we needed to put in a Super-Kamiokande.”

“Right,” Kirk said. “The Can.”

Doc glanced at him and noticed Kirk had a slight grin.

After two hundred yards, the tunnel opened into the large natural cavern eighty yards deep and eighty wide. They paused in the entrance as Kirk took it all in.

“Most people think there is only one Super-Kamiokande in the world. Over in Japan, deep inside a mine shaft. But we have this one and the Russians also built one, after we figured out that it could detect a Rift in early formation. Sharing data with the Russians and Japanese, we can eventually triangulate the location of a Rift.”

A steel grating extended out over the open space, with several workstations.

Doc pointed down. Flat black water reflected the overhead lights. To Kirk it looked like the water in the quarry back home, on a moonless night. Scary, dark, and deep.

“This is a stainless-steel tank holding that water. Sixty meters wide by sixty deep. Along the walls of the tank are over twenty thousand photomultiplier tubes. They are extremely sensitive light sensors that can detect a single photon as it travels through the water and reacts with it. They are all linked together to those displays over there.”

A young Asian man was watching the displays Doc indicated, one of two people on the duty shift. The other on-duty person was a young woman five desks away, peering at her screen with a rather bored expression.

“Since we built this, the Can has detected the formation of every Rift in the past seven years: nine altogether. So it is not exactly the most exciting place to work, unless something bad happens.”

“Sort of like the Nightstalkers,” Kirk said.

Doc raised his voice so the two worker bees could hear. “The Can is critical in getting us on-site as quickly as possible. We even managed to block three Rifts from opening by arriving before the formation was complete.” He walked over to the young man. “Anything?”

“Nope. Everything’s quiet.” He nodded toward a stack of papers. “The latest printouts are there for you, Doc.”

“Technically,” Doc continued to Kirk, “this is a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Cerenkov light is produced when an electrically charged particle travels through water. The reason this has to be so far underground is to allow the earth and rock above us to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet. It also helps that we are in the middle of the desert.”

“Yeah,” the young man said, “but we’re underneath Area 51. Some researchers do some strange experiments in that place. Once in a while we pick up some weird readings.”

“Yes,” Doc said, not wanting to dwell on that. “But most of the Can is focused into the Earth. It covers the entire planet. Since charged particles should not be emitted by the Earth itself, no one thought to use it that way. It was only when, at the most classified levels, information on the Rifts was shared among various governments, that someone checked the data over in Japan and found they’d picked up abnormal readings through the planet when each Rift occurred. So we had the Japanese keep an eye out, and sure enough, for the next Rift, they picked it up, even before it opened. So it became a priority to build one here and in Russia.”

“What exactly are you looking for?” Kirk asked, pretending to be interested. He now also appreciated Nada’s last Yada:
Just tell me how to kill it
. This place was all about telling them where the “it” to be killed was, and he appreciated that, but still...

The young man answered that. “We’re looking for muons.”

“Right,” Kirk said. “Moo-ons?”

“Seriously,” Doc said, “there is a reason Moms makes me take every new team member down here. I know all you are thinking of is
just tell me how to kill it
.” Doc laughed at the surprised look that flashed over Kirk’s face. “Yes, every Shooter focuses on that. But you have to understand the Rifts aren’t fantasy and the Fireflies aren’t magical. It’s science. We will figure it out someday.”

Doc pointed down at the dark water. “Eighty years ago physicists thought the building blocks of matter were the proton, electron, and the neutron. They also knew about three other particles: the photon, neutrino, and positron. But there was a problem. The protons in the proximity of the nucleus, holding equal charge, should repel each other, but they didn’t. It was a Japanese scientist who found the reason, and he was awarded the Nobel for his brilliance.

“He came up with a new force to keep the protons in place, which required a new particle, which he called the meson. He determined that the ratio of the force in this new particle was inversely proportional to its mass. This made the meson two hundred times larger than the electron.

“Once the theory was out there, lots of scientists started looking for mesons. One of the best ways of doing that was to study the sun because it puts out the strongest electromagnetic field in the solar system.”

“Sort of the way Eddington proved Einstein’s relativity right by studying eclipses,” Kirk said, causing Doc to take a couple of intellectual superiority steps backward.

“I had a really good teacher,” Kirk explained, seeing Doc’s surprise. “Everyone needs at least one really good teacher, even someone from Parthenon, Arkansas. He liked giving us weird
information ’cause he knew some of us liked it.” Pads didn’t, Kirk recalled. He’d learned early on to keep the little nuggets to himself or else Pads probably would have kept him from even going to school. It was only because of the free lunch that Pads allowed any of them to walk the three miles to the small schoolhouse.

“That is true,” Doc agreed. “I went into physics because of a high school teacher.”

“So we got something in common there,” Kirk said.

“We have the team in common,” Doc said.

“That too,” Kirk allowed.

Doc stared at him for a few moments. “All right. Back to the physics. What they found was that it was more than just the meson. There were two particles: one had the strong charge with little mass: the pion. The other had a lot of mass but little charge: the muon. Both are very unstable and decay rapidly when separated. The muon decays into three particles: an electron, a neutrino, and an antineutrino. Discovering this was the start of particle physics, which opened the doorway to what you just referred to: quantum mechanics and special relativity as well as Einstein’s energy-mass relation.